Congratulations to The Speccie for a masterpiece of car crash journalism, in Darius Guppy’s defence of Boris Johnson. BoJo absolutely needed the “he’s a liar but hey, aren’t they all?” defence right now. I can’t remember anything causing more hilarity in social media.

But let me draw your attention to one short part of Delerious’s rant, one that refers to me:

A police informer planting listening devices in someone’s home – an offence for which he was arrested. He admitted guilt, only to sell the recordings to the press at a later stage.

This, from a man who is involved in a grotesque example of lawfare against me at the moment, libel trolling with a completely baseless, vexatious action in South Africa where the most important point in the dispute – the allegation he showed me shipping documents that he said were for the illegal export of armoured vehicles to Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war – boils down to my word against his.

If you were involved in such a dispute and if you were already facing a counter-suit for libel, would you go out of your way to publish a paragraph of new libel against your opponent?

Would you publish a lie that not only isn’t true, but also can’t possibly be true?

You see, in 1990 and 1991, when I tapped Guppy’s phone, telephone tapping wasn’t illegal.

It wasn’t made illegal for the best part of a decade afterwards.

So of course I wasn’t arrested for it or for anything related to it. Of course I didn’t ‘admit guilt’; there was no crime to be guilty of.

And as for the ‘police informer’ bit, if I had given evidence against Guppy as an informant he’d be back in jail by now. Informants have very strong protection from harassment by the people they give evidence against. Instead, because I was just one of 60 odd witnesses, I have to spend money paying a criminal investigation consultancy to put together a detailed complaint of what is colloquially known as ‘stalking’ before Guppy can be arrested and jailed for his six year (and counting) campaign of on- and offline stalking against me.

The real reason for this dispute remains the same. Guppy framed me for robbing him in New York and I had no choice but to give evidence against him – as a witness not an informant. Here’s a video of me discussing the framing with Ray Berke, the detective who investigated the ‘robbery’ in New York. If you’re interested, there are a further two videos of discussion about the incident. You’ll be amazed, but it turns out Guppy wasn’t the Master Criminal he’s made out, and the police saw through him.

More to follow when I have a bit more time.

UPDATE: Well I’ll be jiggered! It was illegal. Guppy’s still lying, of course – he knows quite well I wasn’t arrested – but I’m posting this to correct the claim the tap wasn’t illegal.

And there’s tumbleweed blowing across the empty streets of a ghost town.

What was front page news when Israel was to blame becomes a page 37 small box correction nobody notices. Everyone remembers the child killing and Israel.

… if Jews can listen to Wagner, conservatives can listen to the Smiths.

But on Monday the head of the Modern Musavat party, Hafiz Hajiyev, told the Turan Information Agency that the time has come for Aylisli to be punished for portraying Azerbaijanis as savages.

“We have to cut off his ear,” Hajiyev said. “This decision is to be executed by members of the youth branch of the party.”

From, via.

All you need for context is ‘unable to locate’ something.

I was chatting earlier today with a partner in a criminal forensics consultancy. This firm (of ex-Met personnel, mainly) is employed by solicitors in complicated cases to perform forensic analysis of things like telephone records, which form a large part of most serious trials. The work just isn’t there at the moment. That’s because large complicated investigations have been scaled back, leaving the simpler ones to keep crime stats respectable.

So it sounds like the cuts really are having an impact on the investigation of serious crime. Ironically, they’re all waiting for the News International hacking cases to come through. Lots of telephone analysis there!